From Frankenstein to Martin Guerre, Marcel Theroux picks his favourite
stories of life beyond death

Immortality, much more than love, is the oldest subject in fiction. Today’s Transhumanists share Gilgamesh’s dream of finding a way to live for ever. But, if these five storytellers are right, life after death comes with its own set of problems.

I don’t know what’s more extraordinary aboutMary Shelley’s Frankenstein(1818): that this fresh, strange, genre-defining book is almost 200 years old, or that its author was only 20 when it was published.

For Mary Shelley, the frontier of science was electricity. For Edgar Allan Poe, writing The Facts in the Case of M Valdemar (1845) 30 years later, it’s mesmerism – hypnosis – that seems to hold out the ghastly possibility of extending life.

Clunky, stagy and never entirely convincing, W W Jacobs’s The Monkey’s Paw (1902) is none the less built around an almost perfectly conceived plot. It also gets at the central paradox of life after death: isn’t a human without mortality by definition a monster?

With his characteristic compression and insight, Jorge Luis Borges describes the last days of a condemned man who wins a breathtaking shot at redemption in The Secret Miracle, a story from his Labyrinths (1962).

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A true story this time, from 16th-century France, inNatalie Zemon Davis’s The Return of Martin Guerre(1983). Martin Guerre goes to war, then comes back. Or does he? The resurrection in this story addresses the question of what makes us uniquely us.